Hark and LO, bitchery! It is I, your intrepid fantasy romance correspondent, delighted to inform you I have found a winner. The Shadow and the Sun is a fun, sexy, pretty well-written, and unabashedly FANTASY romance novel.

The setup is this: in a medieval-ish fantasy world called Quoregna, a warrior woman named Halina, who is the bastard daughter of the king of Ursinum, is charged with a mission to convince a reclusive wizard, the Shadow Mage, to join a war effort against the neighboring country of Besera. She has to go to his eldritch castle in the snowy mountains to make her case. However, the Shadow Mage (whose name is Geshen) is the brother of the king of Besera and has pretty much no interest in joining the war on either side. Meanwhile, his magic powers are waning as he undergoes a transition from being a Shadow Mage, who gets his powers from darkness, into a Sun Mage, who gets his power from light.

That’s the overall jumping-off point of the plot. However, all of the geopolitical and magical stuff is not actually that important to the meat of the story, which is two people who don’t initially trust each other but are incredibly attracted to each other slowly falling in love in a creepy castle. If that sounds like your jam, you’ll probably be entertained.

This is quite a trope-y story, in both a good way and a bad way. On the good side, there’s a compelling enemies-to-lovers setup. While Halina and Geshen don’t have personal animosity for each other at the outset of the book, they each have significant reasons to try to convince the other of a particular course of action, and are potentially prepared to harm each other if cooperation can’t be achieved. You also have the gruff but sexy wizard living in a ramshackle castle, the badass lady warrior who resists the control of men around her, and a nursing-back-to-health plotline. These are all familiar fantasy romance elements, but they are rendered with skill here, which gives the book a comfort-food feel. It’s a solid riff on some classic elements.

That said, not every trope here is one that I personally enjoy. This book also has the VERY annoying trope where an obviously gorgeous woman (Halina) is considered “ugly” by her people because she has exactly one feature that is “unusual” in her homeland. In this case, freckles. FRECKLES! Can you imagine seeing a straight-up DIME and then being like, nah, she has adorable freckles, gross. But as is often with a trope extravaganza, you win some, you lose some, you roll your eyes through some.

It also has to be said that this is an incredibly thirsty book. Halina and Geshen are fairly unabashedly horny (in general and for each other), even when they are thinking about how they are going to control and/or subdue and/or thwart each other.

For example, at one point, when Geshen is making candles for the long winter in the castle, Halina goes to continue negotiating with him:

He flashed her another of his wolfish grins as he set a wide, iron cauldron into the pit. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I dip my wick before you kill me, Margrave.’

If he was trying to shock her, he’d woefully misjudged. She spent her days surrounded by soldiers; ribaldry was her second language. She cocked her head and smiled seductively. ‘By all means, Master Sorcerer, dip away.’ She strode across the room to his work area, adding a little extra sway to her step. He still gripped the cauldron as she stopped beside the table.

Even though some of their thirsty flirting is corny, I found it kind of refreshing to have a couple where neither is particularly confused, alarmed, or dismayed by their frank and unvarnished desire to have sex with each other. They might not be able to agree on who is going to fight for who against what for most of the book, but they both know they want to sex each other up, and the tension this creates drives a lot of the story.

Overall, the romance is solid: it’s well-paced, with a lot of simmering push and pull. I also found the fantasy and magical elements to mostly work well, although I did get a little lost at the final point when various Bad Magic machinations were resolved. It all seemed a little hand-wave-y with some explanations that did not fully track for me. I would not say this dramatically impacted my overall reading experience, but if you are a real stickler for the B-plot of your fantasy romance making total sense this may bother you.

The main thing that prevented me from completely loving this book is that there are just a few moments of bizarre offhand sexism in some of the narration and dialogue. It reads like an attempt to create a certain kind of gritty medieval fantasy atmosphere gone somewhat awry. For example, when Geshen is thinking about his waning magical power, we get:

His power had become as reluctant as a virgin and as meek as a baby.

Reluctant as a virgin??? Excuse me?? I’m not even sure exactly what this is supposed to mean but it’s definitely icky. There’s also some talk of Halina having “bigger bollocks than most men,” because yes, of course, when a woman is powerful she MUST have figurative male sex organs. It did not otherwise seem like Geshen or Halina actually held these kinds of sexist attitudes which makes these moments extra-jarring. While these instances did not prevent me from enjoying the book, they certainly detracted somewhat from my enjoyment.

In spite of some weird moments, I’m glad I read this book. The core romance is strong and has the trope-y fantasy flavor I crave. The Shadow and the Sun feels a little like a fantasy romance diamond in the rough and I think if the premise and main tropes appeal, it’s a fun choice. This book is actually the first in the series, but it functions perfectly well as a standalone, with the two main characters committed to each other and HFN. I will probably pick up the sequels eventually because I did find the two main characters fun, but I don’t feel particularly urgent about it.